


mirage (only tonight)

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cinderella Elements, Con Artist/Thief Rey, F/M, Prince Ben Solo, background Tico sisters and Jannah, if Cinderella were a career thief
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:14:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23019907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: She doesn’t belong here. She's a grifter from the very lowest rung of society, a common street hustler with dirt under her nails and palms rough as knotted wood, hands that might in another life have been elegant ruined by calluses and scars from countless bare-knuckle scraps. All anyone would have to do is take a good look at her for the cracks to show.- or, a thief named Rey crashes a party, and meets a prince named Ben.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 47
Kudos: 130





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melusine11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melusine11/gifts).



The House of Alderaan throws excellent parties.

Admittedly, the standard by which Rey judges any soiree begins and ends with the quality of the food on offer, but while she knows next to nothing of the daily trivialities of high society she likes to think that snacks, at least, are something she can confidently say she knows a bit about.

Less than she’d like, obviously, but that’s what these shindigs (and their lavish buffet tables) are for. It isn’t exactly astronomical physics, even if these snobs like to pretend there’s some kind of art behind decent food.

That said, the food they’re serving here is _very_ good. A bit on the small side, but that seems to be the fashion among the rich types who host and attend these parties—the type that take having enough to eat for granted, who’ve gotten so accustomed to plenty that they’ve circled back around to serving the tiniest of morsels and calling it _cuisine._

To Rey’s mind, anyone who thinks a cake the size of a robin’s egg is an acceptable thing to serve to one’s guests _deserves_ to be robbed.

Which is where she comes in.

And somewhere in this melange of perfumed politicos, patricians and well-dressed toffs, the sort of people who wouldn't be caught dead in her neck of the woods—the sort of people who've never known real hunger in their lives—is her mark. The guest of honour, so to speak. The man she is here, specifically, to rob.

Well. Lightly swindle. Relieve of some surplus wealth. _Redistribute some prosperity,_ as Rose would say. If all goes well, it’ll be a far more sophisticated operation than mere _robbery._

Thus far Rey has managed to blend in with the guests milling around Varykino’s sunlit terrace (and really, what further proof is needed that these people have more money than sense than the fact that they _named_ their _house)_ —or at least, she’s managed not to attract too much attention to herself, despite the fancy gown that allows her to mingle unchallenged also being an actual _death trap._ The long, flowing skirt had snagged on her boot as she descended a step, bringing her up short and almost sending her stumbling into an ornamental fig tree—she’d managed to avert disaster, narrowly, catching herself and masking the curse that slipped out behind a sneeze, but her nerves have been on edge ever since.

She had never imagined she might miss her worn old leggings, which are surely more patch than garment by now, or the shirt she’d acquired by waiting for its previous owner to pass out, but her usual attire is a damn sight easier to move in than this slip of a frock that both disguises and threatens to reveal her.

Glamour is a double-edged sword, she’s coming to realise. The dress may be the most beautiful thing she’s ever worn by an embarrassing margin, but one wrong move and this game is over before it’s even begun.

She had felt a girlish sort of flutter inside when she saw the river of forest-green silk laid carefully out across the foot of her bed—like it was waiting for her, she’d thought, swept up in the excitement of the moment. Like she’d stepped into the pages of a storybook. It was a silly thing to think about a stolen dress, even as she was clambering into it and letting Paige button her up like a real lady getting ready for a ball; even as she looked down at her own body and beheld its lush colour against her skin, as she dared to trace her fingers over the light, layered skirts. It wasn’t _hers—_ stars, it had been second-hand even for the thief that wore it last. Rey would never own anything as pretty for herself. None of them would. Even in her most childish daydreams, as a girl newly-arrived on the streets, it had been hard to imagine that the stories the gutter-rats told one another over the evening fires could ever come _true._

The princes and queens in the tales, with their fine silks and painted faces and gilded, shining palaces, belonged to another world. Against the backdrop of the city’s underbelly, it may as well have been another universe.

But it’s their universe in which she trespasses now: their glittering otherworld in which she must, somehow, act like she belongs.

Relatedly—

Rey's just demolished her fourth savoury sweetmeat and is reaching for her skirt to wipe away the crumbs when Rose's voice rings sharply in her mind.

 _Try not to ruin this one,_ she had admonished that morning, with the long-suffering air of one who knew she was fighting a losing battle.

Rey determines to prove her sister-in-larceny wrong, this once, and reaches instead for a serviette.

Conveniently-sized gowns of questionable provenance don’t grow on trees, after all.

She’s dabbing the linen demurely against her lips, mindful of the rose-pink paint lending her features some colour, when, suddenly, there he is.

How she knows, she isn’t quite sure, but something about him catches her eye and—yeah. She knows.

Scavenger sense, they call it. Intuition, she prefers. There may not be an art to knowing good food from bad, but there is to knowing one’s mark at first glance.

He’s not what she was expecting.

He sits in the shade of the southwest wall, half-hidden by the overgrowth of flowering clematis that wraps around the villa's entire southern façade and might, one day, swallow the whole thing. At first all Rey can make out are the waves of dark hair tumbling over his broad shoulders, lustrous as crow feathers and thick as a wolf’s pelt with care and good health, and the pair of long legs folded awkwardly beneath the stone bench—but then, as if aware of eyes upon him, he tilts his head just _so_ toward her.

The movement reveals a pale face dominated by full lips, dark eyes, and a long, imperious nose, a countenance of stark drama softened somewhat by the startling _redness_ of those lips; by the scattering of moles across his brow and cheeks and the delicate golden filigree adorning his chin.

Above him, the sprawling vines form a perfect woven bower of emerald green and star-shaped ivory blooms, their frilled petals struck with vivid pink. A canopy, Rey thinks idly, above the throne of a prince.

And Ben Solo, last son of the exiled Organa bloodline and one of its few members still living, _is_ a prince, albeit one without a crown or a kingdom. His maternal homeland is gone, razed to ashes in the war of decades past—though the ruins can still be seen smoking across the sea on clear days—and the rumours differ as to whether he rejected or was denied (some say by his own mother) the governorship of nearby Birren, but even stripped of his ancestral legacies and having spent his whole life a guest in a foreign country, he’s still doing well enough that this one job could set Rey up for life if she plays her cards right.

Exile can’t have hit the family that hard, she muses, if this is only their _country_ residence.

Later, she’ll account for the precious seconds lost in watching him as _observing her mark,_ but in the moment all she can do is look.

That second glance reveals a creature of contradictions. He’s tall, and so widely-built even a dark doublet can do little to hide it, but there’s an incongruous sort of delicacy to him—a careful poise that makes her think more of the fine ladies with whom she brushes shoulders at parties like these than of the swaggering lordlings she does her best to avoid.

Pretty, she thinks. He’s pretty.

Not what she had been expecting, but then, what would have been? How should the son of a princess and a privateer, celebrated war heroes both, look? It isn’t as if Rey knows any: there can’t be that many of them wandering around, even here where every turn brings her face to face with medals pinned to lapels and scars from conflicts past, faces and names and legends she knows only from history.

When he was still only an abstract, a faceless target in the gang’s latest scheme, she’d imagined a pampered playboy, snobbish and spoiled, full of the arrogance that comes of privilege and far too impressed with himself for her liking. Handsome, in the way that those who can afford to look after themselves often are, with soft hands and good teeth, but too far up his own backside to wear it well. She can't see Solo's teeth or his hands from here but she can extrapolate from the well-groomed state of the rest of him, and yet—

And yet, he doesn't immediately get her hackles up the way that imagined rich boy undoubtedly would.

Maybe it's the fact that he looks so deeply, desperately _uncomfortable._

Even someone who doesn't make their living from reading people would be able to see it. He's chosen the most secluded part of the terrace as his sanctuary, partly concealed not only by the enormous vine and the curve of the wall but also by the way he sits—legs tucked under the bench he is by rights too tall to occupy comfortably, shoulders hunched like a man trying to hide just how _large_ he really is. Everything about his demeanour is geared toward taking up as little space as possible: as someone who grew up on the streets and gets by on her ability to go unseen, Rey knows all too well the look of someone trying hard not to be noticed.

Despite his efforts, and despite herself, she's intrigued.

She finds herself comparing him to the reputation that has slowly but surely built up from the rumours concerning the young Prince of Alderaan; of his athletic prowess and his academic passions, his stern countenance and mercurial temper, which have collectively painted a rather unflattering picture of a temperamental, narcissistic brat. Looks can be deceiving, few in this villa must be more cognisant of that than Rey, yet the discovery of a brooding wallflower where she’d anticipated a puffed-up princeling has her swiftly recalibrating her next move.

But she looks too long. Perhaps sensing her gaze he glances in her direction, and her heart flutters at the intensity in those dark eyes as they seek and find hers.

They widen in surprise, and for whatever reason—sunstroke, sudden madness, or more likely plain old reckless stupidity—she doesn't look away.

Under her stare, a slow blush begins to crawl up his cheeks.

 _Hmm,_ Rey thinks. _This could be a problem._

⚷

Paige calls them _entrepreneurs._ Rose calls them _liberators of the people._ Jannah calls them _crooks._

Rey calls them _con artists._

There’s just a little more flair to it, in her mind, and _flair_ is what she desperately wishes she possessed even the tiniest measure of at times like these: the ability to charm her way past questioning glances, to sidestep suspicious remarks with nothing but a smile and a graceful _exeunt._

Paige could do it. Paige’s smile could charm the stars out of the sky.

Paige should be _here._

Paige would have been, if she hadn’t broken her foot in a fall during the last job, and if this damn dress hadn’t turned out to be exactly Rey’s size.

Paige, Rey had thought mutinously, as she stepped onto the terrace and into the soiree proper, owed her one.

⚷

At last she manages to tear her eyes away from him, and retreats to the edge of the balcony to distract herself with the view over the lake.

More than anything else about this place; the food, the clothes, the _people,_ it’s the breathtaking sight of those crystalline waters that reminds Rey she is an interloper.

She doesn’t belong here. She's a grifter from the very lowest rung of society, a common street hustler with dirt under her nails and palms rough as knotted wood, hands that might in another life have been elegant ruined by calluses and scars from countless bare-knuckle scraps. The hair braided down her back is dry and brittle for prolonged lack of nourishment: the body beneath the gown is rail-thin and sinewy as a wild dog's. All anyone would have to do is take a good look at her for the cracks to show.

People like her don’t get views like this.

Her hands flatten against the golden balustrade. The lake’s shining waters beckon.

There’s a stall in the marketplace in Hanna City, run by a woman from the Togruta people of the far west. She sells jewellery, there—nothing overly precious, a few pieces of tarnished silver at most—but in the back of the stall hangs a sheet of beaten metal, polished to a high shine, that serves as a mirror for prospective customers. When the light is right it can be seen from all the way across the bazaar, flashing like a signal fire guiding lost ships into port.

There was a place, deep in the wilderness Rey once called home, where a chance lightning strike had transformed the barren desert into an otherworldly plain of fractured glass plates, which beneath the midday sun blazed too brightly to look upon but in the mornings and evenings would smoulder like an ocean of fire. Seldom would anyone set foot there, unless they wanted that foot sliced to ribbons, but there was a strange, alien beauty to it from afar that, once seen, could never be forgotten.

It is to these memories that her mind wanders, as she soaks up the tranquility of Naboo’s lake country.

Her gaze travels further afield, to the far side of the lake where a few leisure boats drift placidly on the still surface. This particular water is landlocked, yet the sight of them fills her with the same sense of heartsick longing as the ships she likes to watch sail out of Silver Bay’s harbour, bright sails aloft as they make for the open water and the far burning line of the horizon beyond. She’ll watch them go from her place on the dock with a storm of mingled joy and grief inside, and her heart singing for the thought of one day being aboard one of them.

One day.

Maybe, if all goes well with the job at hand, one day _soon._

Rey seizes that thought in a metaphorical fist and crushes it like a bug before it can take wing. Idle fancies. There is no _one day:_ there is only today, and if she doesn’t get her head together there won’t be a tomorrow either. The middle of a job is no time for daydreams and _this_ job, above all, is the product of months of planning. Her sisters are counting on her. Failure isn’t an option.

 _Focus,_ Rey commands herself. _Getting distracted is how you get killed._

It was one of Mama Maz’s favourite lessons to impart to her young protégés: that staring at the horizon blinds you to the pitfalls at your feet.

Eventually, she manages to clear her mind. Turning back toward the villa, to where the prince sits beneath his canopy of flowers, Rey comes to an abrupt stop as soon as her eyes alight upon the alcove. An involuntary sound of utter exasperation escapes her.

He’s gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Fucking _stupendous._

She had taken her eyes from him for all of half a minute—if that—and somehow, in that fleeting slip of time, he’s managed to disappear.

Maz would have her guts for garters.

“Balls,” mutters Rey.

The reply comes from somewhere to her left.

“Ben, actually.”

She reacts without thinking, whirling toward the voice with a barely-stifled _yelp_ of surprise, reflexes honed by years on the streets putting her immediately on the defensive. One hand reaches behind her head to close around the ornamental flower pinned into her braid, while the other flies up in front of her, curled in readiness to launch an attack on whoever could be foolish enough to get this close.

Only to freeze, both falling uselessly back to her sides as she comes face to face with _him._

The prince. Looking down at her, amusement dancing in his dark eyes.

Oh.

He’s tall, up close. Really, really tall.

And _wide_.

It’s a disconcerting thing with which to be confronted, perhaps more so than his apparent ability to move like a shadow in broad daylight—more so than how _close_ he is, even. He’s standing only a handful of feet away from her, close enough that she can make out the unusual glyph-like motif embroidered in gilt thread across his tunic, fine as the filaments of a dragonfly’s wing; close enough that she can pick out each individual flourish and curlicue painted in gold upon his fair skin. Close enough that she can even see the glimmer of chestnut in his hair, the tiny interlacing braids that could only have been woven by another’s hand, and the pale, rebellious sliver of an ear protruding from those satiny curls.

The mere glimpse of an ear shouldn’t be so transfixing, so disarming. And yet, to Rey’s everlasting chagrin, it’s even worse.

It’s _cute._

Stars help her.

And he’s still looking at her.

She bristles beneath that searching gaze, her cheeks growing hot with embarrassment at her reaction—embarrassment, which mutates in short order into annoyance. Hiding her clenched fists behind her back she lifts her chin and boldly meets his stare, instinct as old as the sky impelling her to square up against a bigger opponent and show him that she is _not_ intimidated.

“Can I help you?” she demands, because in the face of how big he actually is she can’t muster the sense to remember she’s supposed to be _charming_ him.

And maybe it’s more hostility than is warranted but honestly, what he thinks he’s playing at, creeping up on unsuspecting strangers like this; if he’d done it in one of Hanna’s back alleys she’d have sunk a shiv into his neck without a second thought—

She almost laughs, then, at the image of this painted butterfly at large in the dingy warren she calls home.

 _(Large_ being the operative word.)

‘Ben, actually’ blinks, visibly taken aback by her rudeness. His eyes, which are much more of a tawny ochre shade up close, rove swiftly over her, taking in her flinty glare and defiant, unwelcoming stance, and grow markedly cooler. “No,” he replies stiffly, and gives a short nod. “Pardon my intrusion.”

He’s already turning away again when Rey remembers her entire reason for being here—and that getting herself thrown out on her ear for offending the host’s son is definitely _not_ it.

“Wait!”

She hesitates until she’s sure he’s stopped; until she's sure he’s listening, though his body is still angled away from her and his face is mostly hidden behind his hair, his broad shoulders rigid like he’s bracing for a blow to fall. She waits until she’s sure she has his whole attention.

“I’m sorry.”

The insincerity in her own voice makes her wince. _Come on,_ Rey chides herself, reaching deep to summon every ounce of theatrical talent she possesses and bring her genteel, sophisticated alter ego to life.

Tarting up her appearance had been the easy part: it’s everything else that’s proving the challenge.

“I mean....I apologise. I was surprised.”

Less accusatory than _you scared the ever-loving hell out of me,_ and contrite enough (she hopes) to soothe his stinging ego. Laying the meekness on thick, Rey bows her head slightly and reaches for another persona—another mask, one she hasn’t worn in a very long time. Not since she was a girl, and survival meant playing nice with the sharks who populated her home waters; meant keeping her head down and making herself small and unobtrusive and useful in their eyes.

It is a great gift, after all, to be underestimated.

“Forgive me.”

Back then she had bitten her tongue almost bloody to survive: these days, she teaches others to fear her teeth. Still, playing the ingénue has its uses.

Let him think her toothless. Let him underestimate her.

Rey turns, and walks away.

⚷

Catching a mark’s attention is like hooking a fish, Mama Maz used to say. The old pirate had been fond of her salty parables, mementos of a long and storied career on the high seas—King Kanata, they called her, corsair queen with her devilfish banner and legendary crimson-hulled ship. She had retired to dry land only when age and injury made the smuggler’s life untenable but her heart had never really followed; had never truly abandoned the _Nymevian Castle_ or its crew. The ocean was in her blood, she’d tell her young charges when a more poetic spirit moved her: in her blood, and she’d spilled enough of it, but that was just the price for a life of freedom on the waves.

 _Just like that,_ she’d say, watching the girls cast their lines into the oil-slicked harbour waters. Supper, as well as schooling—she would never impart one lesson when she could manage two. _Patience. Feel the tide, find your moment. Don’t be afraid to give them a little slack, before you reel the sucker on home._

⚷

He finds her again, of course, but then—this is his house.

Away from the bustle of the terrace, away from curious or suspicious eyes, Rey slips into the villa and claims refuge from the revelry in a long, airy hall.

There, the chatter and music from outside fade away into a stillness reminiscent of a temple—or a tomb. The air itself seems to sparkle, dust-motes caught in the light dancing in the draft caused by her entrance, transmuted through some unworldly alchemy into flecks of pellucid gold.

The light, which falls in sun-kissed veils from windows set high up in the walls, reveals a vaulted chamber constructed entirely out of different shades of stone. Marble, she thinks, sculpted and polished till it gleams: until now she’s only ever heard of the priceless rock over which wars were fought in days of old—over which kings and empresses scrapped like cats for monopoly while their slaves laboured for decades to raise monuments and palaces to their masters’ pride. It’s always seemed nonsensical, to Rey, that anyone would fight over something that cannot feed you, or clothe you, or keep you warm, but if you don’t have to worry about any of those things then, she supposes, you’ll just find something else to squabble over.

The family who own this house are royalty, or descended from it. Not even two generations ago a real, actual queen had walked these hallways, had entertained her own guests on the very terrace Rey’s just left. Had her ancestors waged wars for this precious stone? Had they overseen the suffering of slaves in order to create such a magnificent chamber?

And it _is_ magnificent, there’s no denying that. From one end to another run two rows of slender columns, their lofty forms glimmering like fire trapped in amber and crowned in ivory where they meet the high arched ceiling. The walls beyond are dull purplish-red in colour, like bruised flesh or offal on the butcher’s stall—the macabre made strangely beautiful by the soft-edged interplay of light and shadow over the mottled stone. Beneath her feet the pristine white flagstones make Rey instantly self-conscious, certain her old boots will leave a mark though she buffed them to within an inch of their lives in readiness for today, unable to shake the fear that a pretty dress and a good scrub will not be enough to mask the truth of who she is.

She feels that truth acutely now. There may be no eyes to judge her, no noses turning up in undisguised contempt at how little she belongs among all this grandeur, but Rey has seldom been more aware of the shabbiness of her shoes or the roughness of her skin beneath her stolen finery, the way the silk catches on her calluses and scars—or that, were she wearing rags and trailing mud across the shining snow-white floor, she could scarcely be more out of place in a room like this.

But there’s freedom, too, in the solitude. Quietly she moves forward into the middle of the chamber, relaxing a little as the sunlight hits her shoulders and its warmth caresses her skin. Lifting one hand, she sweeps it through the light as though playing an invisible harp, motes of shimmering gold trembling around her fingers.

Glancing up, she realises with a start that she isn’t as alone as she had thought.

There’s a figure standing in the shadows. Several of them, in fact, motionless between the columns, all facing toward the room’s centre. Each and every one of them is strangely short—stunted, almost, as though they are missing a head.

A split second later the penny drops, and Rey exhales in mingled relief and amusement.

Mannequins.

Wooden mannequins, arrayed along the walls beyond the colonnades like unmoving sentinels just beyond the reach of the sun; a little over a dozen in all, each encased in gleaming glass and clad in the most jaw-droppingly stunning collection of gowns and robes Rey has ever laid eyes on.

Slowly she approaches the nearest case, conscious of every soft sound her feet make on the pale stone, and as she draws close her lips part in wonder at the splendour within.

The mannequin comes to about her height, even standing on a shallow wooden plinth; whoever had worn this sumptuous robe was not a tall woman, yet she would have looked impressively and indisputably regal swathed in yards and yards of lustrous, midnight-blue velvet—sculpted, it seems, to take up twice as much space its wearer alone. The outer robe’s stiff collar and puffed-out sleeves create a silhouette both lavish and austere over a gown of lush gold silk, full-necked and glimmering about the throat and chest with an elaborate web of beetle-black gems. The whole ensemble looks far from comfortable, and would probably be downright unbearable to wear in a climate like this one, but Rey is coming to realise that discomfort is often the point.

As if to prove as much, the next case contains a heavy scarlet robe topped by the most ludicrous headpiece, formed of two great arched wigs banded all about with gem-encrusted gold. The robe itself is hardly understated, covered in rich embroidery and hemmed in brilliant yellow over layered skirts of fiery silk, yet all of it pales beside that absurd headwear.

They must have possessed strong necks, these fine noble ladies. Strong necks, and very wide doorways.

Every gilt bead, every brocaded inch of that extravagant getup would feed Rey and her sisters for a week. How hard could it be, she wonders, to liberate a few of those shiny jewels from their homes and put them to better use? Who would notice a well-dressed young woman leaving a party with a few more accessories than when she’d arrived?

This is a private dwelling, after all, not a museum. The clothes in the glass cases must have belonged to members of the family, over the years, put on display more for sentimental reasons than historic—if not purely to show off. They can’t be _that_ well-protected.

Fortunately for the Organa family’s security staff, the third model banishes all thoughts of theft from Rey’s mind.

This one is more sedately attired, in a flowing white confection which—after the drama of the previous outfits—is positively plain, composed of a simple gown adorned in fine curling embroidery that calls to mind the bright furl of waves across the shore, shattering into silver-white foam as they crest upon the sand. A cap of lace sits atop the mannequin’s featureless wooden head, sewn all over with clusters and whorls of tiny pearls so that it glimmers faintly in the sun.

Rey has seen lace before, though never quite so much of it as falls in wintry cascades about the model’s slim shoulders: once, she had even held a pearl in her own hand, still glistening wet from the sea. Yet even like this, parsed down to its component elements, she can scarcely comprehend the richness of the gown, the labour and skill and _cost_ that had gone into creating it..

Just as she can barely contain the gasp of wonder that escapes her when she imagines herself wearing it.

The cynic in her dismisses the image as laughable, a fantasy for a girl who never outgrew her daydreams. She would look ridiculous in an outfit like that.

It wouldn’t fit, for one thing—too short in the leg and made for a more compact figure than Rey’s lean, skinny frame, it would leave her knobbly ankles and scruffy boots bare for all the world to see. She probably wouldn’t even get it over her shoulders, never mind squeezing her biceps into the sleeves or getting the skirts to sit right on her thighs. She would look like a parody of a princess, a joke in costume, only this time the joke would be on her.

But there’s another part of her that is, for want of a better word, _enchanted_ by the thought of wearing such an exquisite garment. This part can almost feel the gentle brush of the veil around her shoulders, the heavy sway of the skirts about her legs; can see in this conjured phantom the image of a girl who never was. A girl who might, had she lived a different life, have been considered lovely.

The thought does not last long. Reality, as ever, is quick to snuff out such fanciful imaginings.

The women to whom these clothes had belonged had not been scrawny commoners worn to the bone with hunger and work. They had been healthy and clean, well-fed and soft-skinned and probably beautiful to boot—gods, these gowns had most likely been tailored to fit their bodies, rather than let out or pinned in for the dozenth time to sit more-or-less right on their latest wearer’s frame.

Rey does not often resent her past, but...sometimes, she wishes it had been a little easier.

The longer she stands, alone in the quiet, the less complete it becomes. Gradually the world begins to intrude once more, in the whisper of the trees outside, the faint murmur of music from far away, the low babble of conversation from the party beyond the walls.

The sound, much closer, of something moving.

“Are you following me?”

Her voice is startlingly loud in the sunlit air, magnified by the arched ceiling and the hush that had preceded her words. A different kind of silence follows, marked by a curious sense of anticipation.

“This is my house.”

A smile has crept into Solo’s voice. He’s keeping his distance this time, loitering in the shadows, a looming wraith in black and blue. Watching her—studying her, she thinks, from the safety of his position by the door.

“And it’s a very big house. But somehow, here you are.”

A thought strikes Rey, suddenly; that she wants to see him in the sunlight.

Wants to know what he looks like, bathed all over in lucid gold.

“These clothes...” Changing tack as delicately as possible, she turns back to the wealth of riches on display behind the glass. “I’ve never seen anything like them. Who were they?”

“Who?” As if her words have freed him, Solo moves forward, closing the space between them until he’s only a few feet away.

“The women who wore them.” She gestures to an elaborate crimson gown trimmed in dark fur and adorned in massive amber gems. Above it sits an equally ostentatious headdress, this one formed of a stiff gold hood framing the wearer’s face like the maw of some giant mantis, and Rey finds herself wondering how much any one of its myriad jewels might go for in the underground markets back home.

Solo comes to a halt in front of a dreamlike confection of flowing ivory and palest pearlescent pink. His gaze, naturally pensive to begin with, grows immeasurably distant. “My grandmother wore them,” he says quietly. “This was her ceremonial wardrobe.”

Rey blinks.

All of these beautiful clothes had belonged to one woman?

The thought stuns her.

Not just any woman, though. A queen, and only one of the many from whom the man at her side is descended. It hasn’t slipped her mind, after all, that the blood in Ben Organa Solo’s veins is as blue as his fine clothes; that he’s probably spent his entire life in rooms such as these, and while it may have stunned her it must all seem terribly pedestrian to him.

“Oh,” she manages, forcing herself to sound light. “She didn’t wear them every day?”

“The daywear is in the next room.”

She can hear the smile in his voice again, soft and sly as a wink across a crowded room. How strange it is, she thinks—she doesn’t know him at all, has spent no more than a handful of minutes in his company, yet already she knows without having to see what his eyes look like when he smiles.

_Or, maybe, Rey girl, you need to get your overactive imagination under control._

“We haven’t met before,” murmurs Solo. “Have we?”

“I think I would remember if we had.”

“Ah, maybe.” She likes his voice; the dark melodic richness of it, the way humour lends it an almost playful edge. It’s the kind of voice that can lower a person’s guard. “What would I have called you, if we had?”

Then again. “Am I being questioned, my lord?”

“I believe they call it an introduction.”

“Alright.” Turning to face him, she executes a shallow bow. “Kira. At your service.”

Solo inclines his head almost as deeply. “Ben Solo, at yours.”

A humble sort of introduction, for a prince.

“Why did you follow me?” Rey enquires, when it becomes clear he has no intention of saying more.

“Curiosity. What brought you in here?”

She shrugs. “Curiosity.”

The slight upward turn to the corner of his mouth is too small and hesitant to be rightfully called a smirk. Gods, Rey thinks: this one has no sabacc face at _all_.

“Why were you watching me?”

“You were alone.”

“So were you.”

“This isn’t my party.”

“It’s not mine, either. I’m just...” He motions as if reaching for a word that eludes him, an expression of distaste crossing his face: “...here.”

Ah. There’s the snob.

“You make it sound like an ordeal.”

His expression darkens, distaste turning first to frustration and then to a kind of resignation as he rakes one large hand through his hair, wincing when his fingers snag on the braids woven therein. “You think me ungrateful.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Ah, so you know what I’m thinking?” Rey feigns an impressed look, even as her voice drips with sarcasm. “Fascinating.”

“I didn’t say _that,”_ Solo mutters, pink spots appearing high on his cheeks.

“That’s exactly what you said.” She manages to keep her tone level, still, even though something about him gets under her skin in a way few others ever have. “Go on, then. What else am I thinking?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer but leaves him there to stew in wordless indignation, moving across the room to the second row of gowns. From here she can watch him at a distance; watch him glower at his feet, features shrouded in shadow, his frustration so palpable she imagines she can hear his teeth grinding in his skull.

As she passes behind a column and emerges on the other side, his head jerks up to stare at her again.

The way his nostrils flare reminds her of a spooked bantha. His eyes, before so warm and mellow, have turned cold, his full mouth twisting in—impatience? Disdain? They’re so dark, it’s hard to tell.

In the ensuing silence his expression is so strange and fierce, his cheeks flushed, his jaw moving like he’s holding a silent argument with himself. Probably over the method by which he’ll have Rey ejected from the premises, she reckons. The front door is custom, but there’s always the lake…

Yet just as swiftly as the odd look crosses his face, and she’s resigned herself to hightailing it out of here with the Organa family guards hot on her heels, it’s gone. Solo deflates, and lets out a sigh that ripples through his whole giant frame. “It was not my intention to offend.”

A very generous person might accept this as a half-hearted apology, of sorts. The kind of apology made by people who have not often had to do so in their lives.

Rey likes to think she’s generous, most of the time.

“Nor mine.”

Even if needling him is proving to be the most entertaining thing to do at this damned party.

_You’ll have to try harder than that to offend me, my lord._

She’s inviting trouble, that much is clear already. He’s a prince: he’s the con. This is just the first step in a longer game and the girls won’t like her throwing it into disarray.

“But you still haven’t told me what I’m thinking.”

Rey never could resist a little chaos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> how're we all doing gang


	3. Chapter 3

Rey was eleven, by her own reckoning, when she left the desert behind.

She had paid off her bond to Plutt in just under seven years, shaving a thousand days from her original indenture with a lucky haul that brought in more coin in a day than most scavengers managed in a month. Fortune had gifted her with a rare chance—a night’s head start on a ruined caravanserai from the days when there were still oases in the Badlands, unearthed out of the sands under Cracked Tooth Ridge by an especially ferocious storm. All it had taken then was the whisper of a curse about the place, some ‘proof’ in the macabre sigils daubed about the walls and the fact that not even the raptors had disturbed the bones left behind, and the ruin was hers for the picking.

She likes to think of it as her first real con. The first game: the end of one chapter of her life and the beginning of another.

It would be another sixty days before she had supplies enough to make the journey east, tagging along with a scrap trader out of Ponema who later turned out to be a deserter from the Arkanis garrison trying to find his own way to freedom.

He was lost, obviously. People didn’t come to Niima Outpost looking for _freedom_.

 _Optio,_ he’d admitted, as he and Rey prepared to part ways on the shores of Lake Nymeve. _First Unit of Auxilia, Eighth Cohort, Seventh Century. Formerly. Just Finn, now._

That was when she began to understand that everyone was a liar, when it came down to it, and if she wanted to survive in the world beyond Jakku she had better learn to be a good one.

⚷

Solo is quiet for so long that Rey assumes she will have no answer from him. Maybe, she thinks dryly, he’s learning: maybe in his ruminations he has weighed the odds of offending her again and determined it to be not worth the risk—or, more likely, he’s finally run out of patience with her teasing. His gaze is so heavy she can almost feel when it slides over and away from her, settling instead on one of the glass cases next to him: like a physical weight falling from her shoulders, at the same time it leaves her feeling oddly bereft.

“When I saw you out there, before,” he murmurs eventually, his voice absent the clipped, proper tone with which he’d parried her questions, “I thought it was strange, that someone could look so content and so bored at the same time. And I wondered...was it the music that pleased you, and the company to which you objected? Or was it the other way around?”

The flicker of mischief in the glance he sends her way feels almost conspiratorial—like a shared joke, somehow, impossible though it is.

Impossible, and ridiculous. She’s known him less than an hour, which is to say, she doesn’t know him at all. She _can’t_ know him, because he’s the mark, and the longer she spends in his company the more she’s coming to realise that, given the chance, she would probably quite like him.

Even if the only thing they have in common is disinterest in his snooty neighbours.

But he’s perceptive, she’ll give him that. Not quite the upper-class twit she’d hoped to find. Rey had known he was bookish from her earlier inquiries, haunting Hanna’s coffee houses and salons in the weeks before the party to learn what she could about the Organas and pick up anything else that might aid her along the way, but she had gleaned very little else about his supposed intellect. The academic pursuits of some minor prince are hardly the kind of scandalous gossip that keeps rumour mills turning, after all, and maybe it doesn’t follow that a bookish mind is an astute one but she suspects this prince might be very sharp indeed when it suits him.

“I don’t really care for parties.”

She finds herself watching him closely as he mulls this over; more specifically (and perhaps more closely than is proper) his _mouth,_ and the way he works the inside of his cheek between his teeth while he pontificates. It’s an unconscious tic that has the unfortunate effect of drawing the eye right to those lips—those full, red lips, ripe and rosy as summer fruits, all soft flesh and bursting sweetness on the tongue and calling to mind far less innocuous images of— _well_. She swallows, suddenly warm all over, and directs her eyeline to safer ground in time to hear his response.

“Yet you came to one.”

Rey shrugs, attempting to inject as much laissez-faire elegance into the gesture as possible as she steps out from between the columns and back into the sunlit nave. “I’d heard so much about this place, how beautiful it is. I wanted to see it for myself.”

The expression that flits across Solo’s face is impossible to decipher. Disappointment? It’s gone too quickly for her to read and yet it lingers on her mind—what, she wonders, had he expected her to say?

“Does it measure up? To what you had heard?”

He sounds almost bored, and she nearly laughs aloud. She might be lacking a few social graces but even she isn’t stupid enough to insult a man’s ancestral pile to his face.

“And then some.”

The unaffected awe in her voice seems to restore a little warmth to his demeanour, but Rey can’t shake the impression that something in her original answer had disappointed him.

“It is a beautiful house.”

“Oh. I—yes, it is, but I meant the view. The lake.” The sun, sparking like white fire on the surface of the water, stirred by the breeze into momentary fragments of crystal light; the willow trees along the shoreline, boughs dripping down almost to the water’s edge; and the far green hills rising up from the opposite side, touched with gold and forever out of reach. Varykino had taken her breath away—and continues to do so—but next to the rolling splendour of the lake country it pales utterly, no more the measure of true beauty than Rey is of true wealth. “I’ve always loved the water. All my life, since I first saw the sea, I wanted to sail on it. To just...get on a ship, and see what was on the other side of the horizon.”

He doesn’t need to know that she was already an adolescent when first she laid eyes on the ocean; that until she and Finn made it to Takodana she had never seen a body of water bigger than a cistern. He doesn’t need to know that she speaks not from the fancy of some idle aristocrat, but from the yearning of a young girl for whom such freedom was an impossible daydream.

“Did you?” His eyes, when she meets them, are full of sincere curiosity. “See?”

“No.” It would be the easiest thing in the world to lie to him and yet Rey hears herself answering honestly. “Not yet.”

Solo hums. “The hardest thing, sometimes, is knowing where to start.”

And just like that, it’s all she can do to keep from blurting out a retort that will surely expose the truth.

 _The hardest thing, your Worship, is being too busy scraping together enough to eat to go swanning off into the sunset on a whim_.

“Yeah,” she says instead, ignoring the bitter taste it leaves in her mouth. “Things get in the way.”

The silence that follows her words is punctuated by the sound of a door slamming somewhere nearby. It serves as a twofold reminder to Rey—that they are only alone within these four walls, and that there is an entire palazzo on the other side of them, full of riches just waiting for the plucking.

But only if she can escape Solo.

Unfortunately, for all she’d first noticed him skulking in the shadows to avoid mingling with his mother’s guests, he’s turning out to be quite the chatterbox.

“Where would you go?” He’s watching her again, taking her measure with those eyes that seem deep enough and dark enough to drown the whole world. Rey knows well the sensation of being _weighed_ and she resists the urge to bristle, to throw high her walls lest he see through—and judge—her inadequacies. “If things were no longer in the way?”

Tipping her head to one side, Rey pretends to ponder the question as if she hasn’t traversed the known world a thousand times over in her dreams; as if she doesn’t still lie awake at night when sleep won’t come weaving adventures out of her imagination, inventing for herself a life of excitement and discovery to distract from the hollowness inside.

As if she isn’t the victim of her own longest-running illusion.

“Felucia,” she replies after a beat. “I want to see the jungles where the trees grow tall as mountains, in every colour you can imagine. And Kashyyyk, where they build cities in the treetops.” Taken by the magic of the thought, she beams at him. “Whole cities—can you believe that?”

Like the sea, she had never seen a forest till she left Jakku—unless one counts the field of petrified trunks north of Plaintive Hand known as the Aegis of Bones, which Rey does _not_. The ancient greenwoods of Takodana had been the first she had ever seen and she’s been a little bit enchanted by forests ever since; by the sun-dappled mystery of the world within the green, the winding, living labyrinth which is both peril and haven and the precise colour of Ben Solo’s eyes.

 _Which are you,_ she ponders, studying the angular line of his profile in the afternoon sun, the proud jut of his nose softened by that damned mouth and the limpid quality of the light. _Peril or haven? Safe harbour or storm?_

Maybe she’s losing her senses, but she wants to find out.

He seems briefly taken aback, and Rey chastises herself for acting the naïf, showing her unworldliness when for all she knows _cities in the trees_ might be perfectly mundane beyond her pitiful scope of experience—or worse, uncivilised, scorned as vulgar among the Naboo _riche_.

Then, the corner of his mouth quirks. “I can believe it. My uncle—one of them—was from Kashyyyk. He took me there, once.”

“Oh.” Right. He’s a _prince._ He’s probably visited more of the world than she even knows exists. “What...what was it like?”

“It is as you say. Wroshyr trees grow taller than any other, and many Wookiees live far above the ground. They use airships to travel between cities, so many of them never descend below the canopy.”

His voice’s low timbre lends a dreamy quality to the images his words conjure, filling her head with visions of white-hulled ships in graceful flight, borne aloft on wings of enchantment (she’s never seen the real thing, nor learned of the mechanics that keep such vessels airborne), trailing nets of bright silver in their wake. She imagines herself at the helm of such a ship, those wings carrying her higher and higher into the sunlit skies until the forest below, which from the ground had seemed to reach the edge of Heaven itself, is no more than an ocean of green unfurling for miles in every direction.

And when night fell, and from the darkness rose a court of stars to dance attendance on the pearly moon, Rey would alight from her ship and go roaming in the firmament, the constellations that had mapped her universe in the desert falling underfoot to guide her through the cosmos on a path of light.

“If I had an airship,” she muses, “I’d fly it to Jedha, and look down upon the ruined giants from above. Do you think they would look like ordinary men, from so far up?”

Solo cocks his head to one side, humming thoughtfully. “I think there’s only one way to find out. From the air, I imagine even your Felucian jungles would look like a garden.”

So mesmerised is she by the very thought, Rey nearly misses his next question.

“Where next, on your itinerary?”

She doesn’t even need to think. “Korriban.”

His dark eyebrows shoot upward. “The accursed continent?”

“Yeah. You don’t have an uncle from there, do you?”

“Hah. Depends who you ask.”

They've nearly fallen out twice already, so she really should know better than to pry. And yet—

“There’s a story there, I think.”

The slightest grimace mars his features, twisting the golden filigree around his lower lip. “Not a happy one.” It is softly-spoken, as rebuffs go, but hard to mistake. “There was a time—when I was much younger—when I thought of becoming an antiquarian. Of travelling all over the world, to discover and preserve parts of history that were in danger of being lost.” He drops his gaze to the floor, as if embarrassed by his youthful ambitions, and Rey watches in delight as the faintest flush rises in his cheeks.

She can’t resist giving that sweet colour just a little _encouragement_.

“You dreamt of spending your life...digging things out of the dirt?”

Stars. If she’d known, back in Jakku, that somewhere out there a prince was dreaming of a life like hers, she’d have upped her prices and hired herself out to the next scholar with soft hands who happened by.

“I...put prosaically.” The smile tugging at his lips becomes full once more. “Korriban did, I admit, fascinate me. I once begged my father to take me there, to see the Valley of the Dark Lords myself.”

Uncles and fathers. He never speaks of friends.

“He never did?”

“Ah. No. Like you said…things got in the way.”

“Hmm. There’s time yet?”

“It was the dream of a foolish child. No one goes to Korriban.” His pale jaw tightens. “Besides…he died some time ago.”

“Oh.” _Nice one, idiot._ “I’m sorry.”

He’s gone very still, again, and Rey casts about for a way to recover from her misstep.

“I’ll go,” she says decisively. “One day.”

Slowly, as a shadow passing over the pale face of the moon, the darkness retreats, and she catches the glimmer of amusement in his gaze again. “I believe you.”

“I’ll go everywhere.” It’s uttered quietly, more to herself than to him: a reminder of the promises she has made; to herself, to a young girl dreaming under the cold night sky; a reminder that this life of hers was bought with blood and sweat spilled every step of the way, and she owes it to that girl to live it to the utmost.

“Are you not afraid?”

The notion has never occurred to her. “No?”

He seems to ponder that—searching for a lie, perhaps, and finding none. “I envy that.”

Rey squints up at him. “What would make you less afraid?”

“I don’t know. My father took me with him, sometimes, when he went away to sea.”

“Your father…he was a merchant, was he not?” Han Solo was a notorious smuggler, and she damn well knows it, but maybe she’s not so bad at this _tact_ thing as she’d thought.

Solo snorts. “In the very loosest sense of the word. He called himself a man of commerce. Everyone else called him a pirate.” He glances sideways at her, once again inviting her to share in some mote of humour. “I even stowed away on his ship, once. I was never afraid, with him. He got us into the most outlandish scrapes and still…I was never afraid.”

The fondness in his voice tugs at something in the pit of her stomach, sending a cold sort of numbness creeping up into her chest to close like a fist around her heart. It’s alien, the love so clear in the way he talks about his father, that infuses every memory; Rey has never felt it, nor been its recipient, and witnessing it in others is like hearing a conversation in a foreign tongue. She knows a few words, a scattered handful of phrases that can almost encapsulate the love she has for her adopted sisters and for Maz, but still she can’t help but feel that she is lacking something—that somewhere inside her is a piece missing.

She feels her incompleteness keenly, listening to Ben Solo recall his childhood with his father. These are memories she will never have: they belong to a life that was denied her. How unfair, she thinks, that he should have both riches and a family who love him, when Fate and the Force saw fit to give her neither.

“Well, maybe you just need some company.”

From the baffled way he blinks at her, you’d think she had suggested he doff his robes and streak past the buffet table wearing only his grandmother’s gilded headpiece, but after a second spent wondering if she genuinely had said something that bizarre, Solo inclines his dark head. “Perhaps you’re right.”

“I’m definitely right.”

Rey is also uncomfortably aware that it’s past time she gave this fish some slack. The longer she’s alone with him, the more likely it is she’ll let something slip—she needs to recalibrate, and maybe take a look around the rest of the palazzo while she’s got the chance. She’ll never hear the end of it if she comes home with nothing to show but some personal gossip about the Prince of Alderaan, even if he is far better company than she’d anticipated; it would be too easy to relax her guard around him, and no amount of stolen trinkets will make up for tanking this job before it’s even begun.

The look he’s giving her is inscrutable, and stretches on for far too long. Rey is the first to break away, smoothing her green skirts to give her hands something to do as she takes a step back, trying to remember her genteel manners as she goes.

“I should return to the party. Wouldn’t want to miss dessert.”

Abrupt (and probably more than a little rude) as it is, she manages to make it halfway to the doors before Solo calls after her.

“Kira?”

She turns to find him facing away from her, hands clasped behind his back, his broad body framed by the glass case beyond him. As she waits, he tilts his head just enough to glance over his shoulder at her, the sunlight catching in his long hair and sparking copper flames within the darkness.

“If the company hasn’t driven you from here by then, would you meet me in the rose garden at sunset? There’s something I would like to show you.”

Later, she will tell herself that this is all part of the plan: that she couldn’t have asked for such an opportunity and yet here he is offering it freely, but in the moment all Rey can do is nod her head, holding back a smile at the naked relief that crosses his face before he, too, nods.

“By the statue, then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was supposed to be shorter and also contain three other scenes so uhh I guess we're doing five now

**Author's Note:**

> partly for the anon who suggested _Con man Rey who falls in love with her mark Ben Solo because he's just so sincere and trusting of her_ and also for Melusine, because she's ace
> 
> inspired in a whole lot of ways by [this lovely art](https://bleumis.tumblr.com/post/190688149794/%F0%9D%93%B6%F0%9D%93%AE%F0%9D%93%AE%F0%9D%93%BD-%F0%9D%93%AA%F0%9D%93%B0%F0%9D%93%AA%F0%9D%93%B2%F0%9D%93%B7)
> 
> another name for several species of clematis is _virgin's bower_


End file.
